October 21, 2009
Brooklyn, NY
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Rocco Landesman. Photo by Michael Eastman. |
Hi. It’s good to be back in Brooklyn, where I lived happily for 18 years. If you can linger here for a little while, get to Coney Island, a colorful corner of a vanishing America – which has thankfully been marked for preservation by Amanda Burden and her enlightened colleagues in the New York City government. And you should also get to Peter Lugers for what is without any doubt the best steak known to man.
My wife Debby can’t be here today, she’s at the Salzburg Seminar, but I wish she could be. Her career has been in philanthropy and the very last thing she ever expected of me is that I would become a “grantmaker in the arts.” Needless to say, I never expected it either. However, Debby is, in a way, represented here by another grantmaker, the legendary Joan Shigekawa, whom I found through Debby’s network and whom I selfishly seduced from the Rockefeller Foundation to join me at the NEA. So far, it’s the best move I’ve made.
Our conference title, “Navigating the Art of Change” refers, with some subtlety, to our present circumstances, and since I’m always reading about how blunt I am, I will go along and translate that as “The news is bad.” You don’t need to hear from me the litany about exactly how bad the news is, you live with it every day. Your endowments are devastated; your presidents and boards are steering money away from the arts; corporations, in the interest of better optics, are having to take their names off arts contributions already committed, well, this is starting to sound like a litany.
The rational and perfectly appropriate response to bad news is discouragement. And believe me, I can empathize. I too, have found much to be discouraged about.
I’ve been at the NEA eight weeks and already I have my own litany: the NEA is funding porn in California, the agency has become a propagandist for the Obama Administration programs, and to truly add insult to injury, we’ve been told, vis-à-vis our share of the stimulus money, that we in the arts don’t even work.
One congressman summed up this view perfectly when he stated, “How can we spend 50 million dollars on the National Endowment for the Arts when we could spend that money creating real jobs like building roads?” I should pause here to note that that $50 million is one six-thousandth of one percent of the money in the stimulus bill. But more importantly, if you are, say, a musician who through long study and practice and talent has risen to play first violin in a symphony orchestra, please understand that although you have two kids to put through college, you don’t have a real job. Discouraging? Just a little.
But here’s the thing. The rational and appropriate response is the wrong one. The right response is the irrational and inappropriate one: Optimism. I will elaborate.
My first interview in the White House for the job of Chairman of the NEA was with Valerie Jarrett. I did a rather odd thing. I brought to the interview a prop (I’m a theater guy), which I placed down on the table in front of me. It was a book written 3 decades ago by a zoologist, Lionel Tiger. The title was: “Optimism. The Biology of Hope.” This book made what now seems to me to be an obvious point: that optimism is a core survival mechanism of the species. It may be unrealistic, misguided, maybe even irrational, but vital. It is hardwired into our DNA. Every day we make decisions because we assume–often foolishly and mistakenly–a positive outcome. We get married, have children, buy stocks, bet on horses, change jobs, you name it.
I’m a theatrical producer. Fewer than 20% of the shows that open on Broadway earn back their investment, it is an absolutely terrible business and the people who invest in it know that. So why do they do it? Because they’re optimistic.
Which brings me to President Obama, our Optimist in Chief. He is a writer, an artist but we’ll come to that later. His second book had a title that would resonate with Lionel Tiger: “The Audacity of Hope”. This is much more than a felicitous phrase that he found in a sermon: it is the manifesto of this presidency and will lay the groundwork for the most arts-supportive administration since Roosevelt.
Again, optimism presumes positive outcomes, the exigencies of the real world notwithstanding. The Obama campaign, and now the Obama presidency, has always been about aspiration: the idea that our current reality, our circumstances, if you will, need not determine our future.
This aspiration takes different forms: people will aspire to racial equality or economic security or educational opportunity, or more crassly, to be rich or famous or revered. We dream, we want to do better, to be better. And the most compelling expression of our desire to reach beyond the quotidian is art: the impulse to imagine, to create, to express.
Art is the most optimistic of activities: the ballerina standing en pointe or being thrown high into the air, lovers breaking into song in musicals, painters through history rendering success in war and hunting, or religious imagery or the exuberant discovery of new forms and shapes, the thrilling, spontaneous riff of a jazz saxophonist, the emotional release of comedy, even tragedy in the Aristotelian sense of catharsis and lessons learned.
Optimistic all, a deliverance from necessity and limits and everyday determinism. There is grandeur in art, there is boldness, there is even, to use a loaded word, the possibility of change, and we mortals need that.
Michelle Obama, a passionate advocate for the arts, said in Pittsburgh at the G 20 Summit: “We believe strongly that the arts aren’t somehow an “extra” part of our national life, but instead we feel that the arts are at the heart of our national life.” How true, yet in a sense the arts are an “extra”, not in the sense meant by our congressional critics, but the extra in extraordinary, a necessity if our lives are to be “more than ordinary.”
OK, I’m sure that by now you are all wildly optimistic. Well, maybe not all of you. There might be a couple of you, way in the back, that are saying to yourselves, “That’s all very sweet, very arty, but what does it have to do with the budget of the NEA?”
My answer is pretty simple. There is a new president and a new NEA. The president first. This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.
Candidate Obama was the first in my memory to establish an arts advisory committee and the first to propose an arts policy. President Obama followed that up by making a surprising, out-of-left field choice to head the NEA, a signal I certainly took to mean he wasn’t interested in business-as-usual for the arts. Not long ago he even referenced the NEA when talking about the budget deficit issue. He said, in a speech at Georgetown University: “Let’s not kid ourselves and suggest that we can solve this problem by…cutting the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.”
And if I have anything to say about it, there is a new NEA. I actually think I’m coming into a better situation than my predecessors did because of the heavy lifting that they’ve already done.
Bill Ivey and Dana Gioia worked tirelessly to build strong relationships on Capitol Hill and to re-establish the NEA as a respected, bipartisan agency with a presence in every state and most Congressional districts. The perception of an NEA Chair cozying up to a select few of the high arts impresarios at galas in New York and Los Angeles is long gone.
The NEA has never been more ubiquitous or more dedicated to the accessibility of the arts for all Americans. But for reasons we all know well, their work, or much of it anyway, was reconstructive. The best policy was “keep your head down, and build your credibility good grant by good grant.”
If there was an unofficial press strategy, it was “no news is good news.” Heaven knows where we’d be today if not for them. But it’s time now to move the ball down the field (yes, I’m a sucker for any sports metaphor) and it’s difficult to do that if you’re always looking over your shoulder to see who might be about to tackle you.
My colleagues in Washington cringe when I use words like “pathetic” and “invisible” and “embarrassing” to describe the NEA budget, so let’s just say that the funds we have to work with are “not that large.” England is the European country that is the worst public supporter of the arts. Their budget? $900 million. That would translate with our population to an NEA budget of $4.6 billion. That’s not going to happen here in my great grand-kids lifetimes. But there are some significant things we can do with even modest amounts of new funding.
So I’m here to tell you today that we have a plan. But since this is America, before you have a plan, you have to have a motto. And it’s not “no news is good news” or the recent “A great nation deserves great art.”
It’s a simple, two-word declaration: “Art works.”
I hope you’ll soon start seeing that logo everywhere. Why “art works?” The fact is that those two words sum up everything we are, or are going to be about, at the NEA. “Art works” is a triple entendre. Of course, “art works” is a noun, which encompasses the very stuff of what we do, the achievements of artists. Great “art works” is the objective of every grant we make.
Secondly, “art works” is a sentence that describes the very activity that I mentioned earlier: art works on and within people to change – that word again – and inspire them, it addresses the need we all have to create, to imagine, to aspire to something more, to become, if only for a few moments, more than we’ve been. It is the most hopeful of human activities. And one of the most essential.
And finally, and maybe most importantly, art works because arts jobs are real jobs. The 5.7 million people who have full-time arts-related jobs in this country are a part of the real economy. They pay taxes and spend money. Obviously. But we’re going to be making a point beyond that. Any discussion of policy for coming out of this recession, any plan that addresses economic growth and urban and neighborhood revitalization has to include the arts. We know, and we can prove, that when you bring art and artists into the center of town, that town changes.
We are in Brooklyn, where right down the street, the Brooklyn Academy of Music has been the catalyst for the transformation of a neighborhood. In a couple of hours I will be at PS 109 in East Harlem, where a former public school in a neighborhood no one wanted to go near, is being made into an art gallery and performance space and what happened? The property values in the surrounding blocks tripled and the tax base increased.
Chattanooga, Tennessee, has been transformed by its arts district. In my home town, St. Louis, Citigarden a public sculpture park, has provided a reason for people to linger downtown rather than just get in their cars after a Cardinals game and drive back to the suburbs.
And Chicago, Illinois? Don’t even get me started. Mayor Daley should be the number one hero to everyone in this country who cares about art because he was a visionary in this field before it was a field.
His work, I should add, began in 1989, 13 years before New York City’s great arts advocate, Mayor Bloomberg, was even elected. Daley spent public money to restore the old vaudeville houses in Chicago and created a bustling, downtown theater district, he built Millennium Park, with its dynamic arts installations, and connected it to the Art Institute of Chicago and now both are powerful attractions for Chicagoans and tourists. It sometimes seems like he has created an arts festival for every neighborhood in the city.
Mayor Daley may love art, but he’s a tough guy, and don’t think he’s not focused every day on the ledger of the city’s economy. Create an arts scene downtown, and small towns have downtowns too, and you change the place. Artists are great place-makers, they are entrepreneurs, and they should be the centerpiece of every town’s strategy for the future. We know now that businesses follows labor, not the other way around.
Strong footnoting to Richard Florida here.
Companies seek a highly skilled workforce and that workforce seeks places with a high quality of life. And at the top of the “quality of life” criteria are education and culture. Business follows people and people follow other people. To twist the great line from “Field of Dreams” (here I am with sports metaphors again), “If you come, they will build it.”
Today, we are announcing that I will spend the next six months visiting neighborhoods and towns all across America, seeing and spotlighting all the ways that art works. I will visit downtown sculpture gardens, art walks along waterfronts, free public performances and exhibitions, historic building renovations, and subsidized artist work spaces and residences.
And I am going to kick off this “art works tour” with a visit to–where else?– Peoria, Illinois on November 6. Carol Coletta, the president of CEOs for Cities will join me in talking with political, civic and arts leaders–including Kathy Chitwood, the head of the Eastlight Theatre who has invited me to see a performance of Rent–and in looking at Peoria’s “warehouse district” that might just be the site of a new MASS MoCA or Marfa.
I already have trips planned to Missouri and Tennessee, and we are setting up visits to California, Idaho, Kentucky and Washington State.
I know firsthand that great art can come from the unlikeliest of places. A few years ago, I visited Eric, Oklahoma, where a museum was being dedicated to one of my idols, the great country music songwriter and singer, Roger Miller. He wrote the music for my first show, “Big River.” While driving the 140 miles from Oklahoma city to Eric, you pass the hometowns of Sheb Wooley, one of the creators of rock and roll, the songwriter Jimmy Webb, and Garth Brooks. What is in the water there? There are certainly no music conservatories, probably precious few music teachers, no colleges, no arts centers, nothing. Just an inexplicable concentration of genius.
But we also need to hear from you. Many of you have been working hard, doing for years what we at the NEA are just starting to talk about now.
And I hope that you will tell us about it. We are opening up a page on the NEA’s web site – www.arts.gov – where each of you, and any of your colleagues can post examples and stories of how art works in your own communities. I will also be posting dispatches from the stops on my tour.
We need to compare notes, we need to get together and find where the best ideas are–in fact we are planning a gathering in the spring on art and neighborhood revitalization and we hope to have your active participation in that–but we need to do more than talk. We need to begin lasting partnerships in this arena, and there is nothing that will give Congress more confidence when appropriations time comes than showing how we–the public and private sectors–are working towards a common purpose.
And we need to start yesterday. Between the time of my nomination and confirmation I reached out to a number of important foundation leaders and my conversations with them were more than encouraging. If there is one thing I’m sure of, it’s that there are great projects, some of them already teed up, that we can work on together and achieve some inspiring early successes. To borrow a line from the Artist in Chief, I’m “fired up and ready to go.”
Am I starting to sound like an advocate? Well, that seems to be a touchy subject. Some quote-unquote “journalists” have recently accused this agency of losing its independence and becoming a propaganda machine. While I want to state in no uncertain terms that the NEA is not a political agency and that when art becomes propaganda I lose all interest in it, I also want everyone to know that the days of a defensive NEA are over. We have a plan and we are going to, quote, “advocate” for it.
Remember, please, that the NEA is an unusual agency within the federal government. We have always been considered the champions of the arts and artists in the public sector. In a sense, we do “advocate” for them in a way that the IRS doesn’t advocate for taxes or the FCC for bandwidth. We promote the arts.
We are grantmakers, not a regulatory or enforcement agency. And will we “advocate” for the President’s agenda as well? If it’s a particular program – e.g. health care reform – no, of course not. But the President picked me for a reason and I decided to go to Washington and sign on with a federal bureaucracy – ugh! – for a reason. And that reason is that within the ethos of this White House, where words like change and hope and aspiration have real meaning, the arts can play a starring role. Whatever might be said on television, radio or blog sites, I have no intention of walking away from the compelling themes of this presidency and a historic opportunity in arts policy.
Will we realize our hopes? Hey, I’m an optimist. I produced “The Producers,” so I’m sure Mel Brooks would give me permission to appropriate and butcher some lines from that show. We are optimistic, irrational, unrealistic and delusional. But we can’t help it. We’re grantmakers in the arts.
In someways the comparison to Caesar is apt – after all, Caeser represents the moral collapse of Rome from Republic to Empire; he liked to do in his opponents; his support among the Roman people was based on widespread welfare and entertainment (bread and circuses).
OTOH, there have been writer/politicians with far more power – for example, one of Anita Dunn’s favourite political philosophers, Mao, who also wrote extensively, and Hitler (the author also of two autoobiographical volumes, and was a self-proclaimed artist to boot…). In fairness to Caesar, however, it should be pointed out that that the essential turgidity of the other three will probably keep them off the “Great Books” list for a long time to come, while Caesar’s work still resonates after 2000 years.
As for the main thrust of the article, the NEA is little more than the continuation of the same mindset that dominated the French Salon and official art of 19th Century France. If it stuck to a mandate to providing reference and context – say the way museums do when they act as repositories for historical work so that contemporary artists can access them – that would be useful. But as it devolves into a propaganda arm, a refuge for has-beens and seeks to shape the culture – particularly in terms that are decades out of date – it becomes irrelvant to real artistic dialogue. Living off the largesse of the NEA is hardly a symbol of artistic optimism; it’s more akin to living in you mom’s basement once you are over 18…
You forgot Calvin Cooldige too. Best President ever.
“This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. [...] then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.”
Good Lord, what an embarrassing bit of hagiographic, sycophantic piffle.
Grant’s memoirs are usually considered the best presidential books, and unlike Barack Obama, Grant didn’t write his autobiography until he actually had some accomplishments worth writing about.
Speaking of accomplished presidential writers, Wilson wrote extensively, Truman’s memoir’s are worth reading, and Calvin Coolidge’s autobiography is first rate. (Plus Coolidge was a translator of Dante and a amateur classical scholar of some ability, which is more than can be said for the monolingual dolt who currently holds the office.)
Also, what do you want to bet that it will eventually be revealed that Barack Obama had extensive help with this “autobiographies”?
Yes – lets pile on. Think of the lives we could save and improve with more art. We already forcibly take money from citizens to fund football and baseball stadiums why not fund high brow art like museums and ballet too. Heck doesn’t the New York Times need some funding for it’s Haiku too??
Bread, Circuses and Ballet!!!
There are no limits to what we can do with other peoples money (i.e. life) As slaves of the state let us all rejoice in subsidizing classical music throughout the country that almost no one listens too – but it’s art. In the name of Robin Hood let us have more clay pots!! More sculptures of Vulcan!!! More paintings of women without shirts!!!
To the barricades and bring your props!!!
Rocco,
Please study Lincoln. His greatest strength was the ability to say a great deal in just a few words. Bill the guy from England who wrote the plays; same thing. This could have been far more powerful if it weren’t so long winded.
Obama does not give the impression of being all that interested in the Arts. I think he prefers basketball. I guess some people will say just about anything to get government grants. Good luck with that.
Mr. Landesman,
You say: “If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. ”
Your confusion of literary quality and political power is unsettling (to say the least) for a Chairman of the NEA.
Obama may be the writer with the most political and military power, as Hitler probably was in 1940, but that does not make Obama a powerful writer, in the sense of a writer who by means of his literary skill can move his readers.
Wow! That was quite an amazing piece but like some of the others I found great factual errors and giant leaps of logic that just are not wise nor helpful to the art community.
Don’t make stuff up that makes your entire piece now suspect of validity and power. WHY not simply say, Obama is a great writer and his focus on “HOPE” is a great thing! Now that is true! Fair enough…
THE greatest problem in this article and it will be the greatest problem in the art community is hitching your wagon to the star that says we can only be artists if the government is behind us!
Sadly, anything the Government has ever become involved in has not done well. I would stay as far as away from any type of “subsidy” as I could. Let art rise and fall on its own merit.
Greater Exposure? Absolutely. Greater education? You bet. Government approval and moral support? You got it! BUT Government money? Taxpayer money? MY TAXES? No, nay, never.
Mr Landesman mockingly sets out the charge that “the agency has become a propagandist for the Obama Administration programs” , and then proceeds with the rest of his talk to prove it!
Hang on a sec.
His statement is illogical. He says America is most powerful, so the leader of America is the most powerful writer.
If that’s true then he’s the most powerful leader since George W Bush, the last leader of the most powerful country.
Maybe he meant it as an insult?
Julius Caesar…ha, ha. Nice irony, Mr. Landesman (it is irony you meant to convey, did you not? for you cannot actually expect dry crackers to taste like filet mignon nor Mr. Obama’s dull pomposities to pass for greatness and elegance.
Lincoln did not write any books (although his speeches and legal papers have been published as books), and Obama is not the first president to have written books by the time he took office.
Wilson was a historian at Princeton before he entered politics and had published several scholarly works. Hoover had written one book about fishing and a translation of a Roman mining treatise. Eisenhower had written “Crusade in Europe,” and Nixon wrote several books, both before and after his time in office. This is in addition to the (mostly ghosted) speech collections that candidates invariably publish.
People used to think Kennedy had written a couple of books, too. I’m glad Landesman knows better.
Dear Mr. Landesman,
One may recall a group of Judean writers several years after Julius Caesar who shall arguably continue to have a more powerful influence over human history than our current president. Also, they had a better approach to health care.
Profiles in Courage
Greatest writer since Caesar? OMG! Sorry, but this appears to be a major suck up. I have read Truman’s books. President Obama is no Harry Truman.
“This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”
Oh really — is that how it works?
So the Carter administration led to unprecedented prosperity for peanut farmers everywhere?
The Truman years are remembered fondly by haberdashers as the best they ever had it?
So the Reagan years were a boom time for acting? Then how do you explain Teen Wolf? Tron? Goonies?
Ridiculous?
Yes, but no more so than this speech.
Please, everyone who is so inspired, create art to your heart’s content.
But stay out of my pocket while you do.
What books did Lincoln write?
What a buffoon is this Landesman. He also forgot Eisenhower who wrote several books. Crusade in Europe was a best seller and the product of Ike’s typewriter. The manuscript is at the Eisenhhower Library. One reason MacArthur chose Ike as his aide (a position Ike held for seven years) was because of Ike’s writing abilities. Many of MacArthur’s official reports to Congress were written by Ike. In the Philippines Ike also wrote many official reports to and for the Commonwealth government that bore MacArthur’s signiture.
classical theatre is alive and well in Louisville, Kentucky!
It seems to be a time for the classics here in Louisville, Kentucky.
Many theatres are producing plays from the classical canon. Recent productions include a Midsummer Nights Dream, Dr. Faustus, Antigone, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Importance of being Earnest and play readings of the lesser known Jacobean plays The Witch and The Arden of Feversham (currently debate swirls around this piece as possibly being a lost play of William Shakespeare.)
Louisville has always been a home for new plays. The Humana Festival has carried that torch for many years, but at least for now, the classics are taking the stage and doing very well! These plays have brought in lovers of the classics and have been a catalyst for ticket sales. Patrons flocked to Actors Theatre of Louisville’s production of Midsummer and Stage One, Louisville’s Professional Children’s Theatre has seen brisk sales for its production of Antigone. So this bodes well for theatres here in town.
Classical Theatre offers a chance to experience a world not available to us any longer and a poetry we do not hear very often. These plays work their ways into our hearts and minds and wont let us go. Have you felt the passion of Romeo and Juliet? Have you fought authority like Anitgone? Students and adults alike are experiencing theatre that has lasted for hundreds sometimes thousands of years. It has lasted this long for a reason, why, because it works.
Classical theatre can be a somewhat risky business, but it has found some success here in Louisville and theatres here have remained dedicated to bringing it to their stages. Audiences have responded well.
There’s lots more. Landesman sold out because “art comes first before freedom.” He did do “The Producers,” the movie of which with Gene Wilder is very funny, and which is also appropriate, because it’s about a scam artist who picks the lousiest play to find backers for, hoping it flops, then he’d not have to pay back the backers’ investments. But it’s a big hit, and he’s in trouble, because now he owes double what they gave him. Wilder plays his accountant. The musical is “Springtime for Hitler.” I say it’s appropriate because all the projects the NEA funds are also losers — they’d never succeed commercially — but they’re made possible with taxpayer money Landesman (and his predecessors) never have to pay back.
Good work, Landesman. You’re sticking to form.
Rocco Landesman,
The National Endowment for the Arts appears to have become a Political Tool, and, as your very speech suggests, Propaganda seems to have become the Word of the Day at the NEA.
No President, of any political party, should be placed upon a Pedestal, nor compared to such a ruler as Caesar or any of the other Roman Despots. Yet, since you opened that door, let’s not forget two of the most artistically inclined of the Caesars, wherin Roman Art was glorified; Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula, and Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also known as Nero. Today, both of Caligula and Nero are reviled for their excesses and debauchery, while Caesar himself is celebrated for creating a supposed Pax Romana: This is the very man who perpetrated Genocide upon the Gauls, practiced political and very posibly true assassinations of people, and ultimately ended the Roman Republic by seizing Supreme Power and Absolute Control of the Senate and the
Military. To compare any President to Caesar, inevitably leads to comparisons of Caesars Despotism; For Shame On You!
In light of your Romanizing President Obama’s Persona, it would be better, as the Romans of olde would say, if you left Public Life. To “Fall Upon Ones Sword” and save face would be Barbaric in this Day and Age.
Instead, We the American People, await your resignation, in Whole, for being the composer of such vile words.
Fred
I found this speech deeply hopeful.
Why is my tax money paying for this?
I think it’s a disgrace that the NEA and it’s members are faithful servants of the government.
The really timeless art was produced well before the era of your subsidized nonsense. Now run along and produce some ’shock art’ to prove how bold and daring and utterly boring you are. ‘Look at Meeeeee… I’m so diffffffffferent’
* yawn *
Charles Ives had the right idea about how to fund art.
IN Luke 2:1 Augustus Caesar also declared that the world should be taxed. So O is in good, dead company
Uhm….some people who have been commenting on this need a bit of a history lesson.
HalifaxCB….no, Caesar did not, and does not represents the moral collapse of Rome from Republic to Empire. He was an elected official, Consul…..so popular with the people because he represented their interests above the interests of the Senate and the aristocracy. Rome was already in turmoil with violent civil war…..Caesar wanted to end the violence because he grew up under the threat of Death from another Dictator…the Roman Republic elected the position of Dictator and does not have the same definition as the modern or contemporary definition.
Julius Caesar was not popular with the elite classes and the conservative faction of the Senate….does this sound familiar?
More important than that is a simple truth that seems to escape all too many people….art has always changed culture. The Renaissance brought civilization out of the dark ages……art has been the driving force throughout time.
Architecture, Fashion and Religion are just a few examples of how art has changed the world.
The logic of the Julius Caeser comment is ridiculous. Roosevelt and the current president are apples and oranges in terms of writing ability. It has been a while since I read Mornings on Horseback, but as I recall, by the time Roosevelt was 42 he had written roughly 36 books on a number of topics. As far as I know by 48 the current president had written two books, both autobiographies one of which was actually supposed to be on the experience of being an African American student in an ivy league law school that ended up being the Audacity of Hope. See below:
Chronological listing of books by Theodore Roosevelt
1882
The Naval War of 1812
1885
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
1887
Thomas Hart Benton
1888
Essays on Practical Politics
Gouverneur Morris
Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
1889- 1896
The Winning of the West, 4 vols. (vol. 1 and vol. 2, 1889; vol. 3, 1894; vol. 4, 1896)
1891
New York
1893
The Wilderness Hunter
1895
Hero Tales from American History, with Henry Cabot Lodge
1897
American Ideals
Some American Game
1899
The Rough Riders
1900
The Strenuous Life
Oliver Cromwell
1905
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter
1907
Good Hunting
1909
Outlook Editorials
1910
African and European Addresses
African Game Trails
American Problems
The New Nationalism
1912
The Conservation of Womanhood and Childhood
Realizable Ideals
1913
Autobiography
History as Literature and Other Essays
Progressive Principles
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
1914
Life-Histories of African Game Animals, 2 vols., co-author with Edmund Heller
1915
America and the World War
1916
Fear God and Take Your Own Part
A Book Lover’s Holiday in the Open
1917
The Foes of Our Own Household
National Strength and International Duty
1918
The Great Adventure
Several years ago, we formed the Trenton Arts Council [Trenton, Ga.]to create an agency that could work with the city and focus on public art. Our first project was a panel discussion about public art. It was attended, in this small, rural city by many more people than we even hopefully anticipated.
Since then, we have installed a mural, two large sculptures, and initiated a banner project.The latest sculpture was a consequence of complete cooperation within the city. A local industry, National Boiler, provided the metal and welding. The city provided the ground and skilled workers to prepare the ground. The newspaper was completely supportive. The artist doing the project was placed in the position of, well, the position of artist. The whole project was accomplished with a minimal budget from Georgia Grassroots Arts Projects. The banner project – an artist designs and executes 10 banners that the city subsequently installs along Main Street in Trenton. Generally silkscreen, the banners remain in place for about five months before they’re replaced by the next run of artist designed banners. That artist is chosen by the previous artist. This project has been running for about three years. Again, there has been a tremendous amount of support from the city residents. A sculpture, the first large project, was installed as the initiation of a creek trail. That is still in process.
In general, there seems no reason at all to “water down” or compromise the art to relate to the area residents. They have no trouble at all with the work we are doing. We held a Beatnik Poetry Reading in Trenton [which is posted on YouTube] that again, was crowded and well received.
La Prensa Latina, premier Hispanic newspaper for Memphis and the mid-south had the privilege to be part of the marketing promotion for the exhibition “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero”. As a Colombian I felt extremely proud that the Memphis Brooks Museum of Arts hosted this exhibition which I have seen only in cities like New York, Paris and Medellin. It was remarkable the way how the Memphis Brooks Museum of Arts brought together different cultures to enjoy and appreciate not just the beautiful collection of Fernando Botero, but also to learn, taste and discover the wonderful Latin world and the flavor of Colombia.
During these three months of the exhibition, I had the chance to see how all the Memphis Latin Community gathered around this exhibition to support and enjoy these masterpieces. Thanks to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Arts for the outstanding commitment with the art, bringing always the best of the best to our community. Congratulations to all the staff at the Brooks, I have seen everyone’s dedication and hard work for the sake of the organization. La Prensa Latina proudly supports our Museum. Make sure you visit the Brooks in your trip to Memphis!
amazing art is unexpected, inspiring, and infectious. Check it out http://www.udigjookin.com/ca.htm this “business” is partnering with Ballet Memphis, and other jookin dancers are members of New Ballet Ensemble in Midtown Memphis. Undeniably an art form that is changing the lives of those involved.
Come and visit us at the Appalachian Artisan Center in Hindman, KY.
The Appalachian Artisan Center is dedicated to building and strengthening an arts-based economic sector through education, business development and support services for artists. This sector includes crafters, musicians, storytellers and others that carry on the cultural traditions of the region.
Don’t you folks have anything better to do than find fault with some comment by visionary leader who is providing leadership, vision and support for the arts in this country?
You’re doing a great job, Rocco Landesman. Thanks for your efforts to make art work. Don’t pay any attention to the naysayers, just keep up the great work. Many thanks from Peoria, and Brooklyn, and Saint Louis, and every other place that needs art and artists not just to survive but to thrive.
S in Brooklyn